This is Optimal Leaving Daily Episode 2800, Mind Over Matter, the freeing nature of thinking about Losing Everything by Alain Masikat of FreeToPursu.com, and I'm your narrator, Justin Molick. Thank you for being here for 2800 episodes of OLD. Unfortunately, I haven't been feeling the best, so I'm doing some reruns this week. This is one of those episodes and falling on the mini milestone of 2800, too.
But it's nice to feature some of these ones I've narrated in the past because some of the authors run out of their content and haven't read them in a while, and Alain Masikat is an example of that. She's a great writer, so I'm happy to re-share this article. So with that, here's the flashback episode as we optimize our life. Mind Over Matter, the freeing nature of thinking about Losing Everything by Alain Masikat of FreeToPursu.com.
Since my early childhood, the most important possession was having a house I could call home for a long time. Having moved eight times by the time I was 14 years old, having a living space that I could call my own over the long term was important to me. I wanted a place that we could afford in an area we would find comfortable indefinitely, and we found that place. I love our home.
I really do. We designed it in 2001 and built much of it ourselves. It's not huge, about 1500 square feet on two levels plus a basement, and we have a lovely backyard on the river, a wood-burning stove, a simple and well-appointed kitchen, and an attic-style bedroom, the kind I was dreamed of having as a kid. It also offers the office and workspace we need to do the work and projects we most enjoy and be very hard to leave it behind, or so I thought.
Enter a potential venture. In 2014, my husband and I were investigating a business venture in the health and fitness space that would require about $600,000 in funding to acquire 9,000 square feet of space and the associated leasehold improvements required to become operational. It was bigger than most other entrepreneurial ventures we'd ever considered, and being rather financially risk-averse, the idea of taking on significant debt and paying as opposed to earning interest was just not acceptable to us. We worked the numbers many different ways, relying on an update of a then two-year-old business plan, and found that we could downsize our current lifestyle and be able to afford the investment while taking on a manageable amount of risk, quite manageable according to the bank, scary as for us.
Our overall exposure was about $100,000, assuming we ran the business straight into the ground, an outcome we both considered unlikely. Setting up the required resources for this investment would involve selling our home or the very least renting it out for a minimum of two years, depending on how the business was doing, dipping significantly into our savings, and getting rid of a lot of our stuff in order to fit our life in a much smaller space. I've always known that we'd sell this home at some point in the future, but I really thought it'd be much, much later than what we were considering at that time. It felt like a shocking thing to even consider, let alone act upon.
I immediately started grieving the potential loss. It took about two months for us to mull over before we decided to take the necessary steps to move on the deal, taking this time to think turned out to be a critical step. During this time, we started imagining what life would look like in our new reality. We started focusing on what we'd be gaining as well as losing, and made the idea of leaving this home easier every time we visualized this alternate future.
Once we became more comfortable with the potential upside of the change, we went for it. We delivered a proposal, comfortable that what we were doing as scary as it was, would turn out okay. Unfortunately, the deal died about one month later when we couldn't close the gap between buyer and seller, and that's the story for another day. An unintended consequence of the deal.
We're still living in our home, so what changed? A few things, and I'm relieved they have, even though their only changes in perception. My fear of what I will lose when we leave this home has now been greatly reduced. The glass can be half full, no matter what you need to or decide to leave behind.
I feel I can dream up whatever I want for myself, without feeling shackled by my current day's possessions. And I don't take for granted that I'll have this home forever anymore, when I find I'm grateful on daily basis for what it affords me in quality of life, both in practical and experiential terms. These points on their own are important, but better still, the mental process of working through what it would be like to lose something dear to me, now applies to how I view other possessions. I often ask myself what it would be like not to have certain things, or what possibilities might open up for us if our physical environment changed.
What do I mean? Let me offer a short list of what's crossed my mind. What if we traded in the assets we use in our current business and professions for investment in different professional activities? What new skills and experience would this change offer?
Could we work on something that we'd find even more rewarding? What if we sold our home, downsized into a one-bedroom condo or apartment, and invested the difference to help grow our retirement savings by leaps and bounds? What if we gave away our soul nearly everything we own and lived half the year in other countries, traveling the world and experiencing a very different life? I repeatedly picturing what I felt was a monumental change in taking steps to make it a reality.
I reignited my imagination, allowing myself to picture many alternate realities where I would be just fine regardless of what and how much familiar stuff would still be around. It's less than the almighty aversion to losing something, the powerful force that all too often keeps us anchored to the status quo. It also made me realize what I so appreciate about our current view, and ability to fully appreciate each opportunity without being overwhelmed by its drawbacks. You just listened to the post titled Mind Over Matter, the freeing nature of thinking about losing everything by a landmassicout of freetopursu.com.
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And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. Thank you to Allen, always nice to be reminded of this idea that things can change quickly, and how helpful it can be to reimagine a world almost from scratch. If you had to start over, what would it look like for you? Would you try to own or rent?
Would you live where you're currently living? I've talked with some people who consider themselves digital nomads, at least at their current age of life, and that means they have a job that allows them to work from anywhere in the world, and so they choose to not really have a home base, but move from one place to the next, muffin internationally, stay for a while, and move on. And that's one of the options Allen mentioned in this article. I would say that's one side, a sort of extreme on the scale of what we call home.
And there are lots of upsides to that, but plenty of downsides as well, less consistency with everything, your social circles in person at least, where you live, your surroundings, the weather, but on the other extreme of staying put, sort of permanently having a home base, well, there's less adventure and novelty. But by thinking through these different ideas and reimagining how things could be, we can really change our lives for however we see fit in this moment. Sometimes something outside of ourselves creates that momentum, but it doesn't have to. All it really takes is a little reflection.
So make some time for that reflection, have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you tomorrow, where you are optimal life. Oh, wait.